from the content-(management)-is-king dept

Techdirt has long operated on a homegrown content management system, but while we've been considering a switch to something open like Wordpress, many other media companies have been building their own proprietary platforms. What are the pros and cons of each approach, and are proprietary platforms necessary to be a "serious" media company in today's landscape?

from the abuse-of-______ dept

This week, the Komodia/Superfish scandal got even worse. So bad, in fact, that the only appropriate response was sheer sarcasm, which Rich Kulawiec provided in our most insightful comment of the week:

Oh, come now, this isn't so bad

It's not like they did something really bad, something so destructive and damaging to the privacy and security of millions of people that it required immediate attention from federal law enforcement agencies combined with the threat of aggressive prosecution that could result in decades in prison...something like, oh, I don't know, downloading scientific research papers?

For editor's choice on the insightful side, we'll look at two other examples of people abusing power, the law, the market or all of the above. First up, after Total Wipes decided the word "download" meant infringement and proceeded to abuse the DMCA to take down all kinds of innocent sites, That One Guy opined on the inevitability of it all:

Natural result of a one-sided law

When a system or law has absolutely no penalty for abuse, it will be abused, and to expect anything less is foolish. Companies who file clearly bogus DMCA claims face no penalty whatsoever for doing so, even if the claims are blatantly false, yet the ones receiving them are still forced to treat them all as valid, unless they want to face harsh legal penalties.

If the DMCA was intended to be even remotely balanced, then there would be hard penalties for sending such obviously false claims, but as it stands, it's working exactly as it was intended to, completely favoring one side, at the cost of the other.

We don't. We're having "this kind of dialogue"---such as it is---only because the government and intelligence community has been dragged, kicking and screaming and pronouncing the immediate doom of us all, into it.

I cycle through a lot of emotions as I keep up with all this... concern, mistrust, whatever. But comments like that make me genuinely angry.

Last but not least, we've got an anonymous commenter who has daringly taken the side of government officials demanding a magical, un-abusable backdoor key to encrypted devices. The engineers have insisted such a thing is fundamentally impossible, but clearly they were just too lazy to hammer out the code:

(There appear to be some syntax errors there, including the use of an assignment operator instead of a comparison one, which would make every "guy" register as "good" automatically. Which means this approach should be just about as secure as any genuine attempt would.)

from the 88-years-of-communication-regulation dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2010, we continued following the story of the school caught spying on students through webcams in their laptops, and the details were not looking good. Especially when we discovered the student in question was only guilty of eating candy.

from the fair-use-week dept

Today we're continuing our recognition of Fair Use Week with an episode of the Techdirt Podcast focused entirely on this critical (but commonly misunderstood) counterbalance to copyright law. Though framed by many copyright proponents as a frivolous exception, fair use is actually fundamental to protecting not just free speech, but everything about our shared culture of art, thought, conversation and criticism.

from the your-machine-has-been-compromised dept

This week, when the president was asked directly about his thoughts on encryption and law enforcement, he gave what was overall a very well-measured response about the need to acknowledge the tradeoff between safety and privacy, regardless of which side you ultimately conclude to embrace. It was a great answer in theory, but it was missing a critical point from the reality of the situation, and That One Guy wins most insightful comment of the week for pointing that out:

You made your bed, now sleep in it

This is something that even children can understand, the idea that if you cannot show responsibility with your toys, you'll have them taken away, and yet it seems to completely escape the government and law enforcement. They've had their chance, to act in a reasonable fashion, to show that they can be trusted, and they have utterly failed.

If people and companies are moving towards phones that are encrypted by default and require the owner to personally unlock them, it's because law enforcement has proven that they cannot be trusted to follow the laws that prohibit them from 'browsing' on a whim or hunch.

If society and the companies in it are pushing for more encryption, and more secure forms of communication, it's because those like the NSA have shown absolutely no restraint in scooping up everything they can get their hands on, just in case it might prove useful at some point down the road.

The government, and the police, have shown that they cannot be trusted, and the public is reacting accordingly. It would be nice if those in the government and police forces were willing and able to admit this, but given that would require them to first admit that they've done something wrong, I'll not hold my breath while waiting for it to happen.

Case in point: this week we also discovered that the NSA has the ability to hide spyware deep inside hard drives and swipe the encryption keys for SIM cards. One commenter asked why they weren't in jail, and jupiterkansas went on to wonder (and win second most insightful comment of the week) what all this accomplished anyway:

Or a related question, since they pretty much have unrestricted access to everything, why is there still terrorism in the world?

Of course, not all hardware is compromised by the NSA — sometimes it's compromised by the manufacturer itself, as is the case with Lenovo's Superfish malware and associate HTTPS hack. Lenovo CTO Peter Hortensius seemed to think that he could handwave this massive blunder because the threats were, in his mind, "theoretical", and both our editor's choice comments for insightful this week come in response to that notion. First up, an anonymous commenter pointed out what an inane statement that is:

Including Superfish and the bogus certificate was a terrible thing to do in the first place, but what convinced me to never buy another Lenovo machine in the future was this exact response by them. It indicates either an insane level of incompetence or a deliberate effort to deceive everyone. Either way, that's enough to put them on my "never do business with" list.

There's a reason I chose that first Lenovo comment — it's an interesting juxtaposition with our funniest comment of the week. The first one made the point in perhaps the most succinct and direct way possible — but there's something to be said for Just Another Anonymous Troll's approach of making it in the most amusing and indirect way possible:

"Yes, there's a big honking hole in my castle wall, but no enemy troops have stormed in through it so any concerns about it are all theoretical."
-King Peter Hortensius the First (and last)

For second place on the funny side, we head to an already-pretty-funny trademark dispute between three companies with logos that are more or less just plain 'W's. Sorrykb might have inadvertently given the lawyers some ideas:

"Today's episode of Sesame Street was brought to you by the letter [removed due to trademark claim]..."

For editor's choice on the funny side, we turn our attentions to AT&T, which had a more creative approach to spying on people: offering lower broadband prices for users who opt in to be spied on. Rich Kulawiec had an idea:

A solution suggests itself

1. Sign up for AT&T's surveillance package.
2. Set up VPN for all "real" traffic.
3. On a spare system that's connected 24x7 and not connected through the VPN, run a Perl script that issues intermittent search queries comprised of terms found on 4chan forums, Twilight fanfic sites, YouPorn, and whatever site is the main one for Bronies. Oh, and Frank Zappa lyrics.
4. Smile while contemplating how confused the marketroids staring at the data analytics are going to be.

...it is difficult to argue any part of the internet is truly "non-commercial" and so the application of the "fair use" defence would seem to remain limited.

So fair use should be severely limited apparently. Boy, that sure does make this bit rather awkward...

For instance, Mike Masnick at TechDirt says:

"People copy stuff all the time, because it's a natural and normal thing to do. People make copies because it's convenient and it serves a purpose -- and quite often they know that doing so causes no harm in those situations."

He's using someone else's quote to promote his own service, which according his own argument, would almost certainly count as commercial use, and therefor fair use wouldn't apply.

... I wonder just how much his service would qualify his use of someone else's work, and the 'harm' it caused? Perhaps a couple hundred thousand or so, depending on how long his post has been up?

The future of digital journalism was even less clear this week in 2005. Some newspapers thought the best approach was to keep lots of content offline. The New York Times, for its part, bought About.com (since sold to Barry Diller's IAC). Of course, iPad editions weren't exactly an issue yet — at this time, analysts were still arguing about the distinction between PDAs and smartphones. That didn't stop lots of companies from pushing mobile TV, though, and while we still weren't sure how big of a draw it that would really be, we were happy to see Showtime start experimenting with straightforward online streaming.

This was the year that SHA-1 encryption was broken. Unfortunately, a decade later it's still in widespread use — though most companies are on track to deprecate it by 2017.

We've got two milestones in the history of the internet and computing this week. First, on February 15th, 1946, the ENIAC was formally dedicated. It was the world's first general-purpose electronic computer, containing 17,468 vacuum tubes, 7,200 crystal diodes, 1,500 relays, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors and around 5 million hand-soldered joints according to Wikipedia.

from the look-and-see dept

For this week's awesome stuff, we're talking all about monitors, projectors and display technology.

Beam

My first thought about Beam — a compact projector that plugs into any light socket and is controlled by your smartphone — was that it's a great idea. My second thought was that it can't possibly be bright enough. But, refreshingly, the video and pictures of the device in action don't make any attempt to deceive on this front: the projections are shown to be rather dim, but still visible, which is the best you could expect from 100 lumens. It's limiting, but it doesn't make it useless, and in the right circumstances for the right applications, Beam could be a very cool solution.

Displio

In a world of rapid device convergence, there's still something very attractive about the idea of dedicated single-purpose units like Displio: a small, configurable wi-fi display that can monitor anything from the weather to an eBay auction. Sure, you could get a smartphone widget or a desktop screensaver to do that job, but would it really feel the same? Some people already do this, at a high cost — I recently visited an office where every conference room was managed by a separate wall-mounted iPad with the sole purpose of scheduling meetings. The Displio looks like it can do that job for $100 a pop.

ScreenStick

This one's not a display, but a display accessory. The rise of mobile gaming has brought with it a revolutionary wave of innovative game design tailored for touch screens, but it's also brought a slew of games that struggle to force traditional control schemes onto these radically different devices. The most common and frustrating of these is the simulated on-screen joystick, which never feels natural and puts a huge cognitive barrier between the player and total immersion. The ScreenStick is not the first attempt to solve that problem by attaching a true joystick right to your touchscreen, but it is one of the nicest designs and best prices I've seen, perhaps capable of becoming a mainstream accessory among the mobile gamers of the world.

from the watching-you-watching-me dept

If you checked out last week's episode, you know that Barry Eisler is a bestselling author with a lot to say about the publishing industry. What you might not know is that he also used to work for the CIA, and he's got a lot to say about that world as well. This week, Barry is back to talk about the culture and inner workings of the intelligence community.

from the abuse-of-power dept

When you get down to it, there are two central overlapping reasons to be opposed to torture. One is that it's wrong, and the other is that it's ineffective. The latter pretty much seals the deal on the former, since the only way someone could even conceivably argue that it's not wrong is if it's clearly preventing more harm than it causes, which has never been the case. After a commenter questioned some of these conclusions, That One Guy won first place for insightful by providing a thorough and excellent rebuttal:

Whereas people who claim that torture does work, or even defend it's practice, have shown clearly that they have lost what little humanity they may have had.

Before I get to the meat of your comment, let's get the most obvious part out of the way:

Even if torture was found to be 100% effective and accurate, it would still not be justified. Ever. Anyone claiming otherwise has shown themselves to be a pure sociopath and/or sadist at best, and absolutely no better, and barely different, than the ones they are fighting.

"That's all very well, but you'll still need to use torture in situations like the one just after 9/11."

You mean like the situations where the torture report found that the information obtained was either useless, or had been found through other, perfectly legal and humane methods? Those 'situations'?

"That's because torture works. It is indeed useless for extracting confessions (people will confess anything, that's true), but it has always worked quite well to extract informations."

For the life of me I cannot see how you typed this up and didn't spot the glaring error in it. If torture is useless for extracting confessions, because people will confess to anything, why in the world would you believe that it would be effective at gathering information? In both cases the person being tortured is going to say whatever they think will make the torture stop. They are going to say what they think the one torturing them wants to hear, true or not.

"And not extracting informations when you have the chance means making it more likely that terrorists will be able to kill more of your civilians."

Here's a hypothetical situation for you: Say you torture someone, and thanks to the information you get from them(assuming, for the sake of the example, that you actually got useful intel), you manage to stop one attack. Good trade right, the basic humanity of the ones performing the torture, and the rights and life of the one being tortured, in exchange for innocent lives?

Right, well that was only half of the equation. Thanks to the intel you gathered, you managed to stop one attack. However, due to the way that you got it, you caused a dozen more attacks(and if you think 'Let's just torture more people and stop those attacks!' you haven't been paying attention). You stopped one attack, and caused even more. Still think that was a good trade?

I mean come on, if a group, or in this case military/government is known to torture prisoners, do you really think that's going to make people like them? Not even close, but what it will do is to increase the hatred of people that already don't like you, or are fighting you, and drive those that might have supported you before straight into the arms of the people who are already fighting you, causing more attacks, and more deaths. It will also significantly decreases the possibility that those fighting you will be willing to surrender, no matter how bad their situation is, as they know death in combat is preferable by far to what might happen to them if they surrender, which also increases the deaths on both sides.

"People who say torture doesn't work think they have found a clever way to avoid the moral dilemma, but they haven't."

Not really. The people who put forward that argument do so primarily because they know the people who support torture are such sick bastards that appealing to emotion or basic humanity isn't likely to get them anywhere, so they instead appeal to the effectiveness, or lack thereof, of the actions. And as has been shown, and has been known for decades, if not longer, torture is a terrible way, both morally, and in terms of effectiveness, in gaining useful intel.

Torture, at its core, seems like a product of authority and power gone wild — something very familiar in the US, where you've got cops like those in New York asking that resisting arrest be elevated to a felony. Second place for insightful this week goes to Trevor for his counter-proposal to that idea:

Maybe we can compromise?

If Resisting Arrest is classified as a felony, make it so that if the accused is found not guilty or the charges are dropped, the arresting officer is automatically charged with False Arrest, also classified as a felony.

For editor's choice on the insightful side, we'll start with one more comment about the cops, this time regarding their fear of Waze and the possibility that people might share speed-trap locations. As usual, the cops trotted out the line that this practice puts officers in danger of being attacked — and one anonymous commenter quickly underlined how weak that argument is:

People killed by (US) police so far in 2015: 119
(US) police killed by people so far in 2015: 0

Next, we head over to the conversation about Sriracha and its creator's refreshingly open and forward-thinking mentality about trademarks. One commenter suggested that, if Tabasco starts making its own "Sriracha", then the company will be profiting from the original creator's work — but an anonymous response clarified why this oh-so-common misconception just isn't true:

I disagree. The Tabasco Corp profits from putting sauce in bottles, and selling them. The money is in the work, not the idea. Lots of people don't get that.

Over on the funny side, we're sticking with the Sriracha post for first place. One commenter expressed some off-brand preference, pointing to Shark Sriracha as his favorite for its "base vinegar flavor" — but Zonker had even more particular tastes:

I prefer Left Shark Sriracha. It just has its own offbeat flavor.

And for second place, we double back slightly to the story about cops and Waze, where one anonymous commenter felt what the situation really needed was some healthy sarcasm:

Those poor, poor, persecuted police...such a risk they take, riding around in a clearly marked police vehicle, with lights all over it, sidearm, club, taser, and a trunk full of small/mid-size firepower.

And now citizens *gasp* knowing where they are!

How can they be expected to remain riding around in their clandestine state with this app ruining their cover?

Oh, the humanity!

/s

For editor's choice on the funny side, we'll head off to two entirely new topics. First, after the University of North Carolina attempted to "fix" hate speech with a totally unenforceable ban on a social media app, we noted that it's possible to teach people better ways of dealing with this kind of thing. But, as beech asked, how could a university possibly do that?

If only we had a place where we could send people to learn about things...

Finally, we've got a response to the FCC's Ajit Pai, whose argument against net neutrality is that it will make it harder for the US to push for open internet in other countries due to how its own policies will be perceived. Except, instead of something like "appearance" or "perception", he was worried about the much flashier-sounding "optics" of the situation, and this led one anonymous commenter to coin an excellent rule of thumb that I'm certain to quote again in future:

When someone uses the word "optics" to mean appearance, it's best to maximize your temporal utility by leveraging the geo-spatial functionality of your feet.

Well poorly said! That's all for this week, folks. We're off tomorrow for Presidents' Day, and will be back with regular posts on Tuesday.

Today, many US cities are competing for a shot at Google Fiber, but it was this week in 2010 that the project was first announced — though we knew it couldn't spur real broadband competition all by itself.

Today, the anti-net-neutrality argument that people don't need or want faster broadband and wireless speeds is ludicrous, self-serving and shortsighted — but, admittedly, in 2005 things weren't quite so clear. There was some evidence that people couldn't find enough to do with broadband and were even giving it up for dialup, and the hype over forthcoming 3G was stymied by the fact that a lot of people weren't sure why they needed it. Of course, there was also already something fishy about the cable companies trying to downplay the importance of speed and the think-tanks railing against muni broadband. And today we know how things really played out: having all that broadband penetration led to the development of new, robust applications and services that nobody could have easily envisioned beforehand.

If you're a fan of Star Trek, or Dr. Who, or Battlestar Galactica, or anything else from the pantheon of television science fiction both old and new, then you should know that it all started this week in 1938 when the BBC aired the first known science fiction TV program. What's more, the program was itself an adaptation of a monumental piece of sci-fi history: R.U.R., the 1920 Czech play that introduced the word "robot" to the English language and the sci-fi genre.

from the hear,-hear! dept

For this week's awesome stuff, we've got some assorted pieces of new crowdfunded audio gear.

waveBlend

The folks behind the waveBlend make a pretty good point: rigging up a house-wide wireless audio system is still a lot more annoying than it needs to be. The best systems out there are expensive, proprietary and always centralized around some sort of master unit. The waveBlend system does away with that: each modular cubic speaker connect to existing WiFi network and teams up with all the others (up to a dozen — however many you need, wherever you need them) to create a no-hassle home audio setup.

gMIX

On the one hand, the gMIX isn't as big a deal as the creator might want to make it sound — a four-channel audio mixer that runs "without batteries" is just a passive line mixer and not a technological breakthrough. That said, the best products aren't always revolutionary, and gMIX does appear to be filling a gap: pro audio gear is expensive, there aren't that many choices of passive mixers around compared to active (powered) ones, and most such gear includes lots of additional features that aren't needed for a lot of applications. The gMIX, on the other hand, is cheap and simple and gets the job done.

Gigcaster

A lot of the innovation around live streaming focuses on video, while audio is often left to languish in "good enough" territory. That's fine for meetings and conferences and speeches, but not so great for music. Enter the Gigcaster: a compact, standalone unit with the sole purpose of making it easy to broadcast quality live music online. This initial model is built using Raspberry Pi, and there are plans to move towards a more fully-featured production model — but there's also a huge focus on hackability, with the device running open source software and allowing for user-made firmware pushes.

from the self-(publishing)-esteem dept

Bestselling author Barry Eisler is best known among readers for characters like John Rain and Ben Treven in his thriller novels. Among watchers of the publishing industry, he's known for something else too: having navigated and found great success in both the legacy industry and the new world of self-publishing. In this episode of the Techdirt Podcast, he discusses the evolving culture and business model of publishing with his uniquely comprehensive insight.

from the rebuking-the-stupid dept

The anti-net-neutrality crowd was out in full force this week, bringing us both of our most insightful comments. First, after Verizon said that regulating the internet for the first time is "unnecessary and counterproductive", DannyB offered his curiously unsigned thoughts on the matter:

Heavily regulating the Internet for the first time would be unnecessary if you were doing your job.

Your Job: to route packets closer to their destination.

Not Your Job: inspecting them, 'prioritizing' them, mis-routing them, playing games with DNS, being the copyright cops for a private industry that has it's head so far . . . well, let's just say it's not your job to do anything but route packets.

As for your lawsuit. Boo Hoo. You brought all of this on yourself.

Sincerely,

Next, after an astroturfing group made a attempt to discredit net neutrality with media campaigns ranging from the stupid to the bizarre (including a porno parody video), John Fenderson decided that in that case, hey, fair's fair:

As long as they're going to make stupid, wrong arguments
We can reply with our own stupid, wrong argument: if these nefarious, greedy companies hate the idea this much, then it must be a great idea.

Of course, net neutrality wasn't the only issue being grossly misrepresented this week. We also saw the MPAA once again insisting that films and TV shows are easily available to buy or rent online, and as such the only motivation for piracy must be a refusal to pay. Unsurprisingly, this claim was quickly debunked, leading to our first editor's choice comment for insightful in which an anonymous commenter reiterates just how stupid the idea of format release windows are to begin with:

Not even like books and music...

The movie industry pretends that they can limit how and when you see their creative works when they're first released to the public - through a movie theater...

When a musician produces a new album or song, does he force you to see it live in concert before you can buy it and listen to it yourself?

When an author releases a new book, do they force you to come listen to someone read it to you (or watch the words roll by on a screen that they control) before you can obtain it and read it at your own pace?

This idea that they can control your "viewing experience" is rather bullshit IMO. I don't want to go to a movie theater - I want to obtain a copy of the movie that I can watch at my leisure, pausing and playing as needed, rewinding and watching again to see the parts I didn't understand or wasn't paying attention to, while eating my own food on my own couch in front of my own TV (or sitting on a plane during a business trip).

The idea that I must wait weeks or months for this opportunity is strange and old-fashioned... and by the time the movie is released on disc (or streaming), it's already lost a lot of it's luster and interest. They're excluding a huge audience here.

A line is a symphony of dots.
A square is a symphony of lines.
A cube is a symphony of squares.

A blended colour is a symphony of primary colours.

Only when you point these things out do you then hear the cries of "well we're still going to just set the limits here, here and here anyway because we JUST ARE" when their logic of "symphonies, not notes" falls apart, sometimes it's "but those things you mentioned are too foundational to meet the limits" one time and "three black circles DOES count for Disney!!" another: they fall back onto "we decide" as the basis of their argument, which is way too slippery a standard to pass any elementary freedom of expression test.

When you cut through all the jargon and crap, copyright believers make the same claim as all censors: they consider themselves capable of drawing lines without falling into corruption.

Over on the funny side, truly the funniest comment of the week isn't from Techdirt at all — it's from the Bob Litt, the top intelligence community lawyer who endorsed magical security backdoors while stating "I’m not a cryptographer, but I am an optimist". As for our comments, first place for funny comes in anonymously from someone who saw a better choice of phrasing:

Damn it, Jim! I'm an optimist, not a cryptographer!

In second place for funny, we've got a response to the big net neutrality news of the week: Tom Wheeler officially throwing his support behind Title II. Unsurprisingly, a member of the "I automatically hate anything with the word 'regulation' in it" crowd mocked the idea in our comments, leading Baron von Robber to follow the train of thought:

Yea, you dummies! Just look at other countries that have regulated the Internet as a utilities. They have multiple ISPs to choose from, higher speeds and lower prices in their regulated states!

Suckers!

Wait a tick........

For editor's choice on the funny side, we've got a theme of food, because why not? First, after the French government made some much-derided warnings about the dangers of people who stop eating baguettes and thus might be terrorists, one anonymous commenter took it as proof of a pet theory:

Atkin's Diet = Terrorism. I always suspected that.

Finally, after one commenter went on a bit of an overboard rant about the trials of ordering pizza online (something I personally love and do far too often), and pined for the good ol' days of a simple direct phone call (which are also the good now days, since independent pizza places aren't exactly extinct), jupiterkansas took the theme one gloriously absurd step further:

I remember when you had to walk to the pizza place to get a pizza because there were no telephones. Of course, they didn't have pizza then either, so you just came home with a rutabaga. And you liked it.

In Australia, iiNet won its lawsuit against movie studios claiming it was responsible for user infringement, and the ruling offered a great explanation of why ISP's can't be copyright cops. The industry responded by immediately asking for a government bailout and, of course, this story and this fight were far from over. On the flipside, an Australian court this week also decided that Men At Work's Down Under did indeed infringe on a decades-old folk song.

There were lots of predictions flying around this week in 2000. The wireless, mobile future was becoming more apparent, and the potential for commerce therein becoming more exciting. That much came true, but so many of the details are off — like how credit cards stick around despite fifteen years of calls for alternatives. Kinda like Usenet, which is anything but mainstream, but also far from dead despite repeated predictions of its doom. And while gaming consoles have indeed evolved into more robust multimedia devices, they haven't replaced PCs the way some expected.

If you've studied economics, even casually or in passing, you've probably heard of tulip mania — a period of Dutch history in which tulip prices exploded then collapsed. It's generally presented as the first recorded economic bubble in history, and its lessons are still relevant to economics nearly 400 years later. This week marks the critical days in 1637 when the bubble began to pop — on February 3rd, tulip prices hit their peak, and by the 5th they were on the downturn. Spotty record keeping left a gap in the numbers after the 9th, but by May 1st the market had bottomed out.

from the if-you-build-it dept

For this week's awesome stuff, we're looking at some new tools and/or toys for anyone who likes to design, build and tinker with their own technology.

Piezo Film Technology

Polyvinylidene fluoride piezoelectric film is a thin, transparent material that can be used to generate sound. Yes: that means you can make speakers out of it. This Kickstarter project is all about getting this interesting material into the hands of makers and developers, so they can start exploring the possibilities of what it can do. Two of the suggestions — paper headphones, and business cards that play sound — are pretty cool by themselves, but the creator is betting (correctly, I suspect) that people can come up with all sorts of cool ideas of their own.

The Element

The significance of 3D printing has been clear for some time now, but the sea change it promises to usher in has always felt "on the horizon". Everyone's waiting for that tipping point that will make it one of the most disruptive, revolutionary technologies in modern history — and The Element is one more step in that direction. It's a small, go-between USB device that promises to take a lot of the technical hassle out of 3D printing. It makes it easier to find and create designs, and (critically) easier to get them properly formatted and sliced for printing without the huge hassle of trial-and-error, plus it adds handy features like queuing and remote monitoring. If it brings 3D printing a step closer to "it just works" status, then it's done its job.

DuinoKit Jr.

When I was a kid, my parents bought me one of those electronic "labs" from Radio Shack. It was a massive board covered in resistors, capacitors, transistors, diodes, switches and other components, each with little protruding springs allowing you to quickly connect them with lengths of wire. Well, the DuinoKit Jr. is that lab on steroids for the modern age. It's the same basic idea, but with components I only dreamed of like a backlit LCD display, an RGB LED and, critically, an Arduino-compatible processor at the core.

from the and-why-is-it-focused-on-information-sharing? dept

Cybersecurity has become a big buzzword in Washington, and there have been plenty of calls for legislation, usually focused on "information sharing" setups that allow companies and the government to compare notes on threats without fear of any legal liability. But the actual issues of cybersecurity are never clearly defined, nor is the need for various legislative changes fully explained. Is the problem really as big as it's made out to be? Or is the whole thing just a bureaucratic turf war?

from the whatcha-gonna-do-when-they-come-for-you dept

This week, we covered the assertion by Google that a gag order they faced over Wikileaks warrants was motivated by feds' embarrassment after the similar warrants served to Twitter caused a huge backlash. One commenter criticized us for not waiting for a response from the feds before publishing, and while that's certainly a necessary part of the story going forward, the complaint ignores the value of analyzing these kinds of conversations as they happen. Of course, one anonymous commenter had another reason, and it won most insightful comment of the week:

The problem here is that no one would be able to trust the agency or court anymore. Even if this isn't the reason, the fact is it's no longer necessary to ask the court or agency behind this because we expect to get lied to anyway.

Meanwhile, after a raid-gone-wrong in which a flashbang burned a 19-month-old toddler, a police union claimed that citizens had to choose between safe neighborhoods and a right to privacy and freedom. That One Guy won second place for insightful by taking a closer look at this conundrum:

Well let's see, the crime in question was the sale of $50 worth of drugs by someone that didn't actually live on the property. The violation of the 'right to privacy' lead to an infant scorched by a flashbang.

Minor drug transaction and no burned infant
vs
Possibly less drug transactions and a burned infant.

Choices choices...

If those are really the only two options, then I think I'll go with accepting some crime in the area, as it seems to be much safer for everyone.

For editor's choice on the insightful side, we start out with a comment on another post about cop misbehaviour, and addressing something important. There's a tendency when talking about police misdeeds to add the caveat that "there are lots of good cops", and while the motivation behind this is understandable, it ignores a critical point: even the good cops are, to varying degrees, passively or even actively complicit in a system that enables the not-so-good ones. Thus we get a simple rule to keep in mind:

Good cops who protect bad cops are bad cops.

Next, we pivot away from the police to look at the cable industry's claim that nobody really wants 25Mbps broadband speeds. An anonymous commenter summed up the circular argument:

There's no demand because nobody is using it.
Nobody is using it because it's not available.
It's not available because there's no demand.

Over on the funny side, we've got a clear theme for our two winners: naming disputes. First, after the MPAA forced the makes of "Rated R" beer to abandon the name, Spaceman Spiff offered up some free rebranding services:

I think they should rename it as "Pirate Beer - The Only Arrr-Rated Brew"

For editor's choice on the funny side, we start on our post about the traveller who was detained by the TSA for carrying Arabic flash cards and given a patronizing interrogation about whether he knows it's the same language Bin Laden spoke. One anonymous commenter brilliantly flipped it around:

Meanwhile in Cairo...

The supervisor asked me: "Do you know who bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building?" Taken totally aback, I answered: "Timothy McVeigh?" Then she asked me if I knew what language Timothy McVeigh spoke. "English," I replied. "So do you see why these cards are suspicious?" she finished.

Finally, we return to the world of police, where one national organization attacked Google Waze for supposedly helping people stalk police officers (and certainly not for helping them avoid speed traps, no sir.) Another anonymous commenter noted that an unrelated rule of thumb holds true:

Never trust anything the NSA says.

What, this is an article about the National Sheriff's Association this time? Well, the warning still applies.

Naturally this meant some were freaking out about the kids, saying they shouldn't use mobile phones. Some took it a step further, saying that blogs should be banned because they are supposedly a hotbed of pedophiles. Meanwhile, one savvy but dastardly kid was raking in the cash with eBay scams. Another kid found a bunch of errors in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, one more step in making people accept the power and brilliance of Wikipedia.

Web portals were a big topic in 2000. This week, we discussed the idea of commoditizing portals while Octopus.com experimented with more user customizability. We wondered if these approaches might sacrifice the power of brand, though some were suggesting that Yahoo's brand is its Achilles' heel.

Also this week in 2000, hot on the heels of the AOL merger, Time Warner announced its plans to merge music groups with EMI. They would go on to grapple with this plan for several months before giving up in October.

One-Hundred Years Ago

On January 25th, 1915, Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Watson spoke to each other in the first transcontinental telephone call, from New York to San Francisco. It was nearly forty years after the same two men held the first wire conversation ever across a two-mile stretch between Cambridge and Boston.

from the ask-them-anything dept

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from the good-deal-for-a-good-cause dept

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Sigh. Yes, I know what MIDI is. And both of these song samples here were generated via MIDI through the same set of MIDI-controlled sound generators, in this case primarily an organ, which is why they both have the same organ. What about that do you not understand? These are not the original songs — they are the stripped-down example versions created for the jury. The jury is being instructed to ignore things like "how the organ sounds" and focus entirely on the composition.

And yes, this is entirely about the composition, and nobody is saying that means there's no ground for copyright. THey are saying nothing that Thicke did infringes on the composition of the original.

What is your point about the Beastie Boys? That there have been other disputes where the recording does matter? Because nobody is denying that. This is a situation where it doesn't matter because the original work was copyrighted before it was possible to copyright recordings, and thus the copyright only covers the composition.

Honestly, it seems like you haven't read even the first thing about this case. You are ignoring all its key aspects.

No... have you been following this case at all? The whole point of this dispute, and the whole reason these MIDI versions were made in the first place, is that the Gaye estate only holds copyright on the sheet music, not on the recording or any recorded elements like the specific style of instruments or their sound.

Moreover, these two examples are not the original songs — they are played on the same MIDI generator, using the same MIDI organ. So of course they sound the same. And of course that has nothing to do with this.

I think it's true that the recordings are mislabelled here and in the Ratter post... will try to figure that out. It definitely sounds like the songs with the vocals swapped.

But, unrelated to that, one key point: the timbre and sound of things like the organ have nothing to do with this, and are not even the sounds from the original songs. They sound similar probably because they are both being played by the same MIDI instrument. But this is entirely about the notes, not the instruments playing them or anything specific about a given recording, which is the whole reason for this stripping-down exercise in the first place.

It's not saying "beheading videos are illegal" that undermines the internet. It's saying "platform providers can be criminally liable as though they directly provided 'technical expertise' to anyone who simply makes use of their platform" that undermines the internet, and that's not at all an exaggerated or sensationalized assertion.

Actually no. It's cleverly written to make it SOUND like it says that, but it doesn't. Read the exact language again closely, and notice how it's structured and where the commas and periods are placed -- in reality, the penalty of perjury applies to ONE THING ONLY, and that's that the person sending a notice is the copyright holder or representing the copyright holder of the work they are claiming is being infringed.

As for the links they target, those can be anything -- the notice is worded such that you only sign your name to a "good faith belief" that the links are infringing, and you're NOT explicitly under penalty of perjury on that part.

Yeah, I know what you mean. On the one hand, it makes perfect sense to utilize the smartphone for that purpose -- on the other hand, it's a little frustrating when there is no alternative. Especially if it's a network device that absolutely should be controllable by desktop software or a firmware interface in the device itself.

I dunno. I've backed lots of things on Kickstarter, and while most of them did end up taking longer to produce than planned, I've never been "scammed" by someone who was trying to take the money and run.

Perhaps we were a little vague, but this is just an initial announcement and we'll be bringing more details as we get a bit closer to the event. But, for now, let me try to flesh out a few things:

Copia has several concrete goals both general and specific. One obvious element is to continue and expand our role, established through Techdirt, of helping to shape the conversation about policy and business models related to innovation (such as long-standing Techdirt conversations about media businesses, patent issues, etc.). A big element of that will be expanding our research efforts — for example, Techdirt's Sky Is Rising reports have been very useful to people in the policy world pushing more sensible copyright policy, and we'd like to be producing far more research like that, in the copyright area as well as lots of others, in order to be constantly arming those people with good, solid data to back up their arguments.

So one of the things you can count on seeing from Copia is research — an event like this, where we bring together lots of experts to discuss these topics (see the website for some of the specific discussions at the Summit) is also about laying the groundwork for future research -- as we identify people with interesting ideas or knowledge or data on various topics, we'll be continuing to work with those people to produce relevant research and other publications (things like education campaigns, guidebooks, reference tools) in the weeks and months following the Summit.

But we also don't want to be limited to just research papers, nor are we solely focused on policy. One of the biggest focuses is ways to route around policy issues. Some examples of this include things like Twitter's patent licensing system (to route around the issue of future patent trolls somehow abusing defensive patents), Creative Commons (providing easy copyright opt-outs and open licensing where automatic copyright law does not really allow for such a thing), or ContentID. We want to identify ways that programs like these can be expanded, and new ideas for things like this that can be created/built, and act as promoters and project coordinators among Copia members to make that happen. For example, we'd love to see more companies adopt open licensing systems for their patents, and we'd love to see there be more CC-like options (including stronger public domain dedications) for content creators.

The General Counsel roundtable also has a very specific goal. We want to create a "statement of innovation principles" that for companies that provide services and platforms and other things, as for how they will promote/protect innovation. This includes things like how they structure their terms of service and their content policies, ideas like not abusing patents or other IP, commitment to things like data portability and open API access, and so on. This is a project that will develop over time — first the GCs from major tech companies will discuss it and start to flesh it out at the event, then we'll open it up for discussion with everyone present, then afterwards we'll be setting it up online for public comment. The end-goal is to turn it into something that companies openly, publicly adopt and agree to — and which users begin to respect, and then expect — and that it will have a real effect on how they do business.

And there is more. So, trust us: though some of these topics are big and nebulous and hard to pin down, our goals aren't the same — in fact, bringing these big-think discussions into the realm of reality, and making real plans for the immediate future, is central to what we want to do.

Though it's true that some of the french Declaration was based on American ideas, that's because America was playing the role of a proving ground for new ideas that were coming from enlightenment thinkers in Europe.

Let's not forget that the French are the ones who funded the American Revolution. They didn't do that just for kicks and then say "oh, hey, some of those ideas are god too" -- they did it because the ideas of freedom and equality were emerging from their own enlightenment culture and could be put into action in the new world a lot faster than they could in the old.

So it would be more accurate to say that both revolutions were influenced by the politics/philosophy/culture of the enlightenment era (which itself had much of its roots in France) than to say that one was the direct precursor to the other. Indeed, even your quoted Wikipedia page continues:

"The concepts in the Declaration come from the philosophical and political duties of the Enlightenment, such as individualism, the general will, the social contract as theorized by the French philosopher Rousseau, and the separation of powers espoused by the Baron de Montesquieu. As can be seen in the texts, the French declaration is heavily influenced by the political philosophy of the Enlightenment, by Enlightenment principles of human rights, and by the U.S. Declaration of Independence which preceded it (4 July 1776)."

One thing's for sure: DH is absolutely right when he says America owes a great deal to France — the popular sneering & mocking attitude of Americans towards the French is baffling and unfounded.

I think it has formed a weird two-way street, though. As humans we are really great at at making ourselves slaves to damaged systems that we ourselves built. So while the MPAA's existence and overall attitude is the fault of the studios that forged it, it's now an entity with its own momentum that feeds back into and shapes the attitudes of its member studios.

"Ownership culture" is no joke. If studio behaviour was purely rooted in cynicism and greed, it would look different: twenty years ago they would have seen the changing winds and by now they'd be experts at rapidly adapting their business model to the online world. Instead they are fixated on this delusional idea that the best way to make money is to enforce copyright, and it's not working -- but it persists because the culture of ownership is so deeply engrained.

So now the MPAA keeps them all trapped. Any one studio could enter revolution-mode and update itself for the times at the hands of one smart, savvy CEO with the guts to try it. But what are the odds of that happening at six studios at once? It won't. And if one tries, the other five become its united opponents. And so the culture of ownership lives on, with the whole industry orbiting the MPAA.